During the second day of Cluj Innovation Days we got a deeper understanding of different topics related to Digital Economy like cloud security, bio-informatics, IoT, e-readiness, blockchain and bitcoin, digital marketing, AI, smart cities and so on.

The 12 workshops brought together specialists who are actively engaged in these domains and people who were looking forward to hearing the latest news, updates and trends.

Cluj Innovation Days 2017 was a great success and we want to thank our speakers, panelists, participants, partners and everyone involved for the entire experience!

Along with the important knowledge and insights which were shared during the two days of conference, we are certain that this was the beginning of new collaborations and projects that will make the world of Digital Economy better and better.

The last workshop of the conference was on the topic of “Digital Economy, the economy of trust”.

The discussion started with two important questions: Who feels accountable for privacy or for security? Also, who wants to pay for privacy?

Technology is moving much faster then regulations are able to so there are a lot of challenges for both users and providers. Transparency and trust are still very important issues.

There are a lot of actions taken at European level for protecting users against security and privacy issues and a key element on this is also raising awareness about these actions which would mean, for example, that the users should read the privacy policy statements of apps or software that they use so that they know fully know their rights and risks.

IoT in Agriculture is not only about the innovation of the tools used for agriculture, but more about the data that is collected from the environment to improve the production and to prevent a big amount of loss.

In the second part of the workshop, Bogdan Doinea presented the way that Varroa Mites, a virus at bees, is prevented from spreading by attaching a chip to bees and tracking their behaviour. We also find out the steps that any farmer can take for using an application available also in Romania to improve their farms.

The last part of the workshop was about the Greenhouses that help productivity by getting data about everything that influences the production process.

We also found out that the students from USAMV are promoting the innovation of technology in the rural zones from which they originally come from.

During the Bio-Informatics workshop, our panelists talked about how our DNA works and how bio-informatics analyses the human genome and that our line of DNA is edited by what we do in our lifetime. We also found out how a disease can be inherited from parents to children and why some generations do not have that diseases.

The environment changes the way that our immunity system react to diseases and our immune system is involved in almost all diseases so, just like knowing all parts of a car does not allow us to know the engine system, we need to understand the whole system of a person in order to understand why someone heals faster than others from the same disease.

On the Digitalization, Blockchain and the Law workshop we talked about how bitcoin is regulated as virtual currency in Romania.

Bitcoin is a global decentralized network ran by users, which is a great aspect from some perspectives, but a general problem is that there is no central authority for bitcoin and nobody is controlling it’s evolution. National authorities are responsible for each country, a fact which creates some issues and confusion about bitcoin regulations.

High volatility of the exchange rate, annonimity, fiscal implications and money laundering are some of the important risks of using bitcoin. European Union does not have strict regulations about bitcoins so it is the role of national authorities to decide on the regulations. One thing is for sure that for any income you have to pay taxes so you have to pay taxes for bitcoin as well.

On the Cyber Security workshop we found out that 85% of mail sent today is spam and by visiting websites with malicious scripts, hackers can get your personal data without your knowledge. Having a trusted DNS provider will prevent many attacks from the beginning.

Cyber criminals can exploit any organisation’s weaknesses no matter the size and the direct impact of this can be business interruption, sensitive data loss and loss of customers due to loss of trust in the brand. Hackers do not sleep so a system can be attacked at any hour. Fixing an application security is as hard as fixing a building architectural problem so we must always be aware of the possibility to be attacked from the very beginning of creating any software.

On the ICT standards for SMEs: e-invoicing and e-identification workshop we asked ourselves if, for example, a Romanian SME wants to do business electronically with an Italian counterpart, what are the requirements for electronic trust services (e-signatures, e-seals, e-documents, time stamps, e-delivery)?

Challenges appear from the lack of real common policies or standards which both can trust. The ambition of eIDAS is to strengthen EU Single Market by boosting trust and convenience in cross-border and cross-sector electronic transactions.

CEFDIGITAL, through CEF eInvoncing, made a call for grants and wants help SMEs foster the update of eInvoicing solutions compliant with the European Standards.

During the AI is coming Workshop we have gone through aspects related to the socio-economic effects and results of automation in today's society.

Romania will witness a much higher impact then the western countries especially considering our deficiencies in education and research. But the main question which arises is if outsourcing jobs will be automated.

Still, AI has the potential to create high productivity which allows other sectors to evolve. The theory of creative disruption states that a breakthrough economic sector can destroy another sector, a fact which has been repeatedly proven in our history. The AI today is one step forward in the direction that the humanity is evolving to.

The first workshop of our Blue Track was a debate on the questions of what can be the impact of new European scale regulation on cloud computing security?

How protected is my data if I upload it to a cloud? In most cases when data gets hacked, companies don't know it in the first 100 days. After finding out, they sometimes need another 30 days to recover after this damage.

A lot of companies which use cloud services invest every year millions of euro in security, focusing especially on building private clouds which are more safe then the public ones.

The biggest problem is still the people working for companies or for cloud providers who don't have an ethical vision.